After Marty Ingels and his wife, actress Shirley Jones, went through a painful, yearlong separation, they arranged to meet for a reconciliation session at their therapist’s office. Marty Ingels, an actor and comic whose off-screen antics were long deemed outrageous even by Hollywood’s lofty standards, died Wednesday in Tarzana, California. Ingels appeared in several films during his career, including Armored Command (1961), A Guide for the Married Man (1968), If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1967), and Instant Karma (1990). Ingels, a raspy-voiced, bug-eyed comic actor who co-starred with John Astin in the early-1960s sitcom “I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster,” died Oct. 21 at a hospital in Tarzana, Calif. Ingels died in the Tarzana neighborhood following complications from a stroke, according to a statement issued on behalf of Jones by her manager, Milt Suchin.

Ingels provided the voices of AutoCat on AutoCat and Motormouse, and was well known as Beegle Beagle, the canine sidekick of a forty foot purple gorilla on The Great Grape Ape Show. In a statement, she said, “He often drove me crazy, but there’s not a day I won’t miss him and love him to my core.” The precise ways in which Ingels deranged Jones, who was known for her demure, Middle American screen persona, can be gleaned from his activities over many decades. Ingels met Jones in 1974, the year she divorced first husband Jack Cassidy, the father of David Cassidy, with whom she had three sons Shaun, Patrick and Ryan. “As he himself said, “I was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn and she was Miss America”. Off-screen, Ingels — who began his professional life as a talking peanut and was later a booker of celebrities on television commercials, a frequent TV guest star and a voice-over artist whose credits included Pac-Man in the animated series of the 1980s — was by all accounts highly voluble, genially combustible, energetically litigious and unmistakably larger than life. There was the time, for instance, that Jones arrived home to find Ingels dancing on the lawn with her Oscar — awarded in 1961 for her role opposite Burt Lancaster in “Elmer Gantry” — accompanied by a hired mariachi band.

I went home and spent several months in my house and became a very serious recluse.” “The ultimate oxymoron: I was once invited to an agoraphobic convention,” he said. “What? There were the struggles with panic, agoraphobia and self-doubt that might well have had him “living at the Betty Ford Clinic in the Jewish and Depressed Room,” as Ingels said in a 2012 interview with Kliph Nesteroff for the website Classic Television Showbiz. He brokered deals for Orson Welles, Howard Cosell, Don Knotts, Farrah Fawcett Majors, Rudy Vallee and other stars. “Basically, I dropped out of show business because I couldn’t control anything,” Mr. She was described in a 1979 Los Angeles Times story as “sweet-voiced, radiantly pretty, cheerfully self-assured” and possessed of “restraint, inner calm and discreet understatement.” When Jones was filming a TV movie, Mr. In 1984, he and Jones settled their case against the National Enquirer, which falsely crowed in a headline that “Husband’s Bizarre Behavior Is Driving Shirley Jones to Drink.” The supermarket tabloid had to apologize and pay the couple unspecified damages.